My wife read the urinal rules somewhere, and verified them with me recently. I pointed out that my observations agreed, but in general I use a stall and thus solve that whole problem.

Anyone ever been to a place that has one of those urinal troughs? A couple of the bars at my school had those. I can think of no worse invention.

Anyone ever been to a place that has one of those urinal troughs?

Many times, but there is a pub near Paddington Station in London that has a wall, with bricks placed about a foot away from the wall and water running down the wall. It's the trough. It looks like it was an after thought to add a urinal. After many Director's Bitters we thought it was the coolest thing. Damned if I can't remember the name of the place. Shakespeare's comes to mind, but that is a bar in Austin, too so I don't know for sure... Shoulda got a picture.

You mean apart from those toilet cubicles you get in the US where the door is only about three foot tall. I hate those, I run screaming when I come across one and save myself til later...

...and even when you find a cubicle with a decent height door it is designed in such a way that there is a quarter inch gap on both sides of the door for the world to look at you though.

There are many of lousy public loos in the UK, but at least the doors hide you from the rest of the world.

In reply to:

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there was a streak of doo-doo on the toilet seat. This is in the bathroom of a frickin' IT department

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So that doesn't just happen where I work, then? I don't know whether I should be relieved or horrified that people in a whole other continent can't seem to manoeuvre their arse over the centre of a big porcelain bowl either! (please excuse my slightly colourful language)

The 'chewing gum in the urinal' thing happens with alarming regularity too. Not surprisingly, there is usually at least one urinal overflowing or one cubicle labelled 'Out of order' in any given week.

Some day I'll catch the freak in the act and expose him!

Considering this thread, you may want to reconsider re-phrasing that.

Me.

How about this one?

http://www.echois.com/downloadables/games/urinal.zip

place that has one of those urinal troughs?

My dad tells a story that when he was on gross anatomy somebody cut the ... ummm... well you know off a corpse and took it to a football game. The perp stood at the end of the trough with the hose running in and with much subterfuge let the ah, member, slip in. He says guys jumped back several feet as it slid by, making its way to the drain end. Dad wasn't actually there at the time, but apparently it made quite a hubbub at the school. The guy was never caught. And good thing, he would have certainly been expelled.

Dividers make it better but.... I find I still harbour a deep loathing for anyone who forgoes the "neutral urinal" and pulls up next to me.

These must be the people who setup right next to you on an empty beach!

The best crappers in the world are in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada. Imagine an outhouse with no walls, just a box, a hole and a seat. Room with a view & no outhouse spiders or stench. There's so few people in the park that you run practically zero risk of being walked in on. Rainy nights are a different story however...

-Zeke

Coolest one IMO in New Orleans is at the Plimsole club at the top of the World Trade Building here. The urinals are against the wall, marble everything, except behind you is glass floor to ceiling. This would normally bother me, except that the windows are mirrored on the outside, and you're the highest thing around by far. Add that to the fact that I takes many thousands of dollars a year just to buy the privelege of being a member of this club and suddenly the normal bathroom faux pas are nonexistent. Very very nice place to conduct your business. Keep in mind that I've only been there twice, and only on special invitation by a member. I come nowhere CLOSE to rounding up that type of change.

I think you missed one. We have an anonymous electronic suggestion box at work. This showed up a couple years ago:

Everytime I go into the mens bathroom and pull up to the urinals, I can see that the "Riddler" has been there again. I mean the millions of follicular question marks scattered and strewn about the lip of the urinal. I mean, do people yank out a handful of dna and sprinkle them about everytime before going? I went to college. I've seen gross stuff before. But, this is just disturbing as I can't picture anyone yanking out a handful. Maybe more frequent cleanings throughout the day? Ultimately, in a perfect world, you'd just ask people to not decorate, but this isn't a perfect world.

Since-hairly yours,

Anon

Now, as for the boogers on the walls, I've noticed that's an international thing. I've seen it in Canada, I've seen it in the US, I've seen it in India. What possesses people to do this?

Oh, and then why is it that people say "hey, what's up?" by way of greeting you in, entering, or leaving the bathroom? What sort of answer are they expecting? "Oh, you know, just doing a little number two. How 'bout you?" Or maybe "I just needed a bit of private time to dig a couple gems out from my nose -- my cubemate is kinda cute, so I couldn't do it in front of her. If you want to check them out, I left them on the wall in the third stall."

The 'gum deposition' habit is like smokers with their butts. There are some smokers who have so habitualised the movements involved in throwing a finished cigarette butt away that they don't actually realise they've done it. A friend of mine was giving a lecture to some campers at a festival about keeping things tidy and not throwing butts away. And, as she's talking, one of the smokers just flicks his but down on the ground and squashes it out with his toe. Despite my friend and several witnesses, he competely refused to believe that that was his butt and insisted it must have been left by someone else.

I think the root cause of all the problems in this thread is that there's a 'public space' mentality that says that mess gets cleaned up by someone else. We pay people to clean up after other people. I've even heard people justify leaving their junk lying around at McDonalds because "well, they pay someone to clean up, I'm giving them something to do". This 'public space' mentality ignores the fact that cleaning jobs are crappy, low-paid work that I personally think is hugely demeaning. And since there is no penalty - no social punishment (like being ostracised) or personal suffering (like living in your own filth) - these grots just keep on fouling up everything for everyone.

My personal advice to everyone here is two fold:

Firstly, find out what harm you create to other people's living and working environments. You might complain about the people leaving nose goblins on the wall, and not wash your hands... (And don't get me started about talking to people with smoker's breath.)

Secondly, clean up. I was annoyed when I nearly ran out of toilet paper at work once and there was no spare roll on the door. So from then on I made a point of putting a new spare roll in whenever I noticed there wasn't one. It might be a bit more work, but I never have to worry about being caught with no paper again. And I might have made some other people's lives much happier.

Think globally, act locally...

Paul

There is a local bar here that has those plastic urinal cake holders. What's so special about that? There is a joke written on them and when you do your business the warmthness of the urine reveals the punchline to the joke. And when your all done and flush the urinal the coldness of the water covers up the answer so that the next person may enjoy the joke as well. I thought it was a damn brilliant idea.

I have yet to find a bath in a "public bathroom". Where is it hidden?

There is an exhibit currently on at the Tate Britain art gallery. It is out in the street out front of the gallery and from the outside it looks like a box with mirrors making up all four walls plus the roof.

Inside there is a fully plumbed in toilet. However, the mirrors are one-way glass so from inside you can see out, but from the outside you can't see in.

Apparently it's quite liberating, if not a little unnerving to sit there and evacuate while being able to see the whole world go by.

And in a bar in NY the loo doors appear to be plain glass until you lock them, at which point they mist up. The doors are masive lcd panels that cost $20k each - but they are pretty impressive.

There is an exhibit currently on at the Tate Britain art gallery. It is out in the street out front of the gallery and from the outside it looks like a box with mirrors making up all four walls plus the roof.

Inside there is a fully plumbed in toilet. However, the mirrors are one-way glass so from inside you can see out, but from the outside you can't see in.

Apparently it's quite liberating, if not a little unnerving to sit there and evacuate while being able to see the whole world go by.

I would be pretty scared of using that - I would worry that it's some kind of hidden camera gag where as soon as you sit down and start doing your thing, somebody presses a button and it turns to clear glass like the LCD panels you mention.

When I was young we used to go to agricultural shows and the toilets there were pretty basic - pretty much a large pit and a plank of wood with a hole and plywood walls. Then again, that was probably luxury to most of the visitors.

Gareth

the toilets there were pretty basic

One word: Glastonbury.

ughh, yeah I totally didn't look at the way that was worded...

Could be worse...

A coworker at my old job worked with somebody that [censored] his own pants and left a big stain on his chair. He wheeled the chair to his boss to show him what kind of slob the guy was. The boss says:

"We need guys like him. He's so dedicated to work that he can't take the time to walk to the bathroom."

there is a pub near Paddington Station in London that has a wall, with bricks placed about a foot away from the wall and water running down the wall...

The University of Chapel Hill football stadium has a similar system, except "urination room" has a large, cube-shaped design and water flows down marble walls into a trough at the base. All one needs to do is stand around and piss on the wall.

University of Chapel Hill

One would assume you mean the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But over here in Raleigh, some of NCSU's older buildings have these very cool urinals that have foot pedals for flushing. Why did that not stick? As filthy as we've established people are, you'd think touching stuff with your hands would best be avoided, and there was technology to do that. Why get rid of it?

That's a cool freakin' avatar, man.

We had a fraternity at Dartmouth like that (AD), except there was no water running in the trough. It was pretty damn foul, to say the least.

-Zeke

One would assume you mean the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

That is what I meant. Good call.

That's a cool freakin' avatar, man.

Thanks.

OMG...

I had to reply to this as the sign they came up with at work was great.
One guy here had such bad "bathroom etiquette" (aim) that by Friday you had to use the can because you couldn't get near the urinal.
So one Monday I stroll in and there it is.

Here at (company name) we aim to please...

SO you aim too PLEASE!

I almost wet myself laughing when I saw it.

We had a fraternity at Dartmouth like that (AD)

Was that not the very fraternity "Animal House" was modeled after?

Wonder if Wesley Clark stopped by to take a leak there on his way to the Sig Ep house (note the apropos sweatshirt.)

Indeed, AD was Chris Miller's house. It's a bit of a different house these days than the one portrayed in the movie. Mostly it's well off rugby players and Ambercrombie zombies. At least is was in '89-'93. These things change. They were in a bit of a bind then over some ill-advised sink-night audio tapes (when pledges 'sink' their bids' - think 'Thank you sir, may I have another!'/KevinBacon) with some less than PC discussion of women.

SigEp's (or at least was) mostly track guys & good students.

-Zeke

It's a bit of a different house these days than the one portrayed in the movie.

That's a shame.. You'd think the fraternity that pretty much defines fraternities would have tried a little harder to hold onto its identity over the years. Or maybe that transformation happened before the screenplay was written? Still, if I were there I would most assuredly do my best to bring down the grades, steal lots of stuff, and get really wasted every night. Then again I did that for my house, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch.

I'd stay away from the underage girls, though.

Yeah at the time my house (Bones Gate) pretty well typified the house portrayed in the film. We consistently had the lowest GPA on campus (occasionally one of the Coed houses would surpass our sloth and get a lower average). At one point I was the only varsity athlete in the house, and I was on the sailing team. It was a lot of fun.

-Zeke